Vice President Osinbajo, Emiefele, Adebayo, Others To Speak At Osun Economic Summit

By Ayobami Agboola, Osogbo

Nigerian Vice-president, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, Central Bank Governor, Mr Godwin Emiefele; Minister of Trade, Otunba Niyi Adebayo; Minister of Steels and Mines, Mr Olamilekan Adegbite; Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr Sabo Nanono and Emeritus Prof. Ademola Oyejide, Chairman, Public Policy Group, ISGPP and other professionals have been pencilled down to speak at the Economic and Investment Summit billed to hold in Osogbo, the Osun State capital between November 19 &21.

The Chief of Staff to the Osun State Governor, Dr Charles Akinola made this known on Tuesday while addressing a press conference to give insight on the proposed summit, where he outlined various programmes of the event.

Flanked with other members of the newly inaugurated cabinet in the state, including the Commissioner for Information and Civic Orientation , Mrs Funke Egbemode, Akinola said the notion behind the proposed summit was to fine-tune a robust economic roadmap for the state by the Gboyega Oyetola-led administration.

He averred that the state would use the forum to showcase array of investment opportunities around the state and thereby attract investors to many critical sectors of the state’s economy.

Akinola highlighted areas of ‘Comparative Cost Advantage ‘ in the state to include Mining , Tourism and Agricultural sectors, saying those three critical sectors would be optimally explored to strengthen the Internally Generated Revenue of the state and by extension boost economic growth.

According to him, the driving force for present economic engagement in Osun was borne out of a strong political will on the part of the government to fulfil it’s campaign promises without delay.

He added that the product of the summit would be maximally utilised to generate a formidable road map for laudable economic planning of significant output.

“We are changing the economic paradigm of Osun through a result-oriented economic and investment summit that will bring about a direction for economic planning.

“Presently, Osun has been in the global consciousness base on robust mechanisms put in place to revolutionise the mining sector for better output.

“The Osun State Government is working assiduously to sanitise the area of gold deposit within Ife and Ilesa axis against seemingly illegal miners and make every activity on the area legal and transparent”, he explained.

Akinola further explained that the state government was partnering with several mining companies to smoothen operation on the mining sites in collaboration with the Federal Government.

The Chief of Staff, while speaking on the efforts of the State Government on agriculture said the present administration in the state was embarking on aggressive investment in the sector to ensure food security and create employment.

Meanwhile, the Commissioner of Information and Civic Orientation , Mrs Funke Egbemode in her remarks called for cooperation from the media by giving necessary publicity to present efforts towards economic revolution in the state.

She boasted that the state, asides having comparative advantage in some critical sectors earlier mentioned also has inherent opportunity of stable electricity.

Egbemode , in her words described the relatively stable electricity supply in Osun as a spectacular advantage of great interest to every investor, saying ” these are some of those things we are going to showcase as our selling points”.